Win a Concretedog synth.....

The ever marvellous Palm Sounds blog is holding a competition to win a small noisemaker synth I built and donated to him a while ago. Here are some videos of the synth in action that Palm Sounds posted.





To enter you have to write a track and publish it to the handheld music soundcloud account using portable/handheld kit. The competition will be judged on best track and most interesting/unusual kit used. Find out more and enter via palmsounds.

Today's Module, 6 channel mixer

Got a bit of time this morning and managed to get one of the modules of my todo list built. It's a passive six channel mixer. I've found that with these simple synth modules I'm building at the moment it's easy to make a patch that has over a dozen audio streams....so building mixers becomes inevitable! I've started using trimpots instead of regular potentiometers as they're much cheaper and also can be mounted on the board which means modules are more compact and I don't have to worry about front panels. I haven't posted every module I've made but thought that this one was quite neatly done and I took the photo above with the excellent old camera emulator "retrocamera" available on the android market.


This pic is of a patch I hooked up a while back and recorded this live track from...
Creeping from the trenches by concretedog

Its a slowburner with little movement in the first 50 seconds. Lots of frequencies in this so headphones/speakers recomended.

This is a test...stay calm and carry on

Got a new android phone and am testing out a blogging application.

Random pic of current cmos noisemaker modules

DIY Tuff stereo Contact Mics

I've been playing around with contact mics for years now and unless I've built them into something solid they have all met a death as the crystal surface on the disk is fragile and the solder joint attached to it usually falls off. Today I set about redressing this and made these tuffened contact mics.

Here's how I did it...STEP 1



I connected up the wires (other end is a 3.5mm stereo jack), soldered them and added some hot glue over the wires and the disk to act as the first bit of cable strain relief.

STEP 2



I insulated the wire connections (yep with gaffa tape...thats how I roll!) and then stuck an "S" of cable to the disk to act as a second defense from cable strain.



Finally (and here's the snazzy bit) I covered the entire surface and up around the cable with polymorph...Polymorph is an amazing plastic that you can buy online (I found the best deals for this are on ebay) that comes in granules. You add the granules to near boiling water and the plastic melts and becomes pliable. You have to work quite quickly but I managed to cover these disks well. You then allow it to harden and it is super tough when it's fully cooled. The only other thing I may do to these contact mics is to run a bit of silicon sealant into the bit where the cble comes out to make them fully watertight...then they can be used for hydrophones for underwater recording as well...



As for today...I just clamped em up to a slinky!

Been away...but still soldered

Spent some time camping but lest anyone think that stops me hacking stuff, this post is to dispell that notion once and for all!

I'm still pouring any rare free time into building a noisy modular "synth" using basic logic devices and whilst on hols I built the above board up which is a couple of oscillators built on a cd40106 IC. I also built up a pseudo ring modulator based on the cd4011 IC. (I may geotag where all the bits of this are built...here's where these modules where put together)



These modules are now part of the growing collection of stuff making up my ghetto modular...of which I'll post an update soon. Last image is of my camping mixing/recording setup...the little mixer is great, built like a tank and powered of a single pp3, I bought it as faulty of ebay for £4.50 posted and the fault was the battery clip had snapped so an easy fix.



And here are the fruits of this little test field recording...pretty noisy as per usual!

Ghetto Sequencer

4 step sequencer with vactrol VCO from concretedog on Vimeo.

So any free time this weekend has been spent creating this..Here we have a 4 step sequencer built from a 30p cd4017 chip and based on this schematic the clock input (tempo control) is provided by an oscillator built on a cd40106. At the moment its controlling a ghetto style VCO (the lower smaller circuit board) which is another oscillator built on a 40106 but being controlled by a hand hack vactrol, basically a light dependant resistor stuck to an led covered in copious amounts of gaffa tape!( I was going to use heatshrink as it is more lightproof but I didn't have any wide enough.) I've kept the different boards separate and have used an old IDE connector with its pins soldered into groups to act as a patch area....this is useful as I plan to build a few different modules and a few more VCO designs and this can serve as a test environment...before ultimately building a bigger sequencer (there's 10 steps available on each 4017!)

I'll post more as I add to it.
(BTW the audio in the vid above is just captured on the mic on my cam)

Sounds from the Breadboard

I'm working hard, when I get the chance to, trying to make interesting synths and things from the CMOS range of chips I was talking about in the previous post.

Today I managed to get this beasty working (you know its getting a bit complex when you need a second breadboard!) So its 2 oscillators one controlling the clock/tempo of the sequencer and the other providing the sound...the sequencer is a pitch sequencer meaning each step is always on and you have some control of the pitch of the note.
I've added a duty cycle and a passive filter for some ghetto sound processing.

If you're a purist you may want to check out the first raw recording I made of this....



or if you want to hear it sounding a bit more interesting this is me playing it through the trusty old Zoom PFX9003 fx unit, lots of low end on this one so headphones are recommended



In a massively off topic finish to this post I took a photo of a dragonfly yesterday that I'm really pleased with and have to share!(click to view larger version)